Best iPad news and weather apps

What are the best iPad news and weather apps? The tablet is just about the perfect form for consuming stories as most have a big enough screen for pictures and video to play nice with the rest of the text. But proper news wouldn't be right without the weather at the end. Hence why we have thrown the two in together here.

The included weather app with the iPhone doesn’t ship on the iPad, leaving a nasty gap where your weather prediction once was. So, don’t expect to be dodging any raining picnics should you be an iPad only kind of guy. Then again, you could always just download some of these brilliant weather apps to fix things.

BBC News app

The BBC's app is a must for news hounds and an essential for any iPhone. Everything is jolly clear and is categorised into UK news, world news, politics, business, technology and sport. You can also stream the BBC news channel, which includes any news clips which have been embedded within stories. Once you're in a story you can scroll left to right and vice versa to navigate - all of it feeling pretty snappy. Whilst there's also the option to share content through Facebook and Twitter if you should so wish.

Using the edit function you can customise content and the clever chaps have also integrated a way of enlarging text if you're struggling to read anything. Altogether then, a decent all-rounder and for free it's definitely worth a go. Read More

Weather HD

There may be better apps out there in terms of weather forecasts. There are probably apps with a lot more detailed and accurate satellite imagery. But you can bet your bottom dollar that there aren't any weather apps that look as stunning as Weather HD. After setting your location you can get weather forecasts in daily or three hourly intervals with the forecast displayed with a superb, crisp looking video. The best of which has to be this rain forecast - the video is so crystal clear and is shot in such a beautiful way that the grass and rain drops almost look 3D.

If the forecast is for night-time then the videos are all shot at night. There's also various different videos for each scenario, so you won't always see the same one for cloudy etc. The time is displayed as well, so if you set your iPad on a frame, and left it on when you had friends over, then you'd have the sexiest digital clock/barometer going. It's a simple but very effective app that kind of shows off everything that is good about the iPad. It's web connected, it's real time, it's easy to use and it just looks so damn cool. Read More

Newspapers

News addicts have been begging for something like this for quite some time. The application acts like an equivalent of iBooks for just about every newspaper in the world. You can dip into filtered content selections from broadsheets and tabloids and pick at the front page content or delve deeper into stories.

The brilliant thing is being able to follow different news around the globe and see how each country covers it differently. At £1.49 it is an incredible resource, even going as far as including local news. If you can speak more than one language, then we don’t think Newspapers can be beaten.

The Weather Channel

What could be better than real life sunshine? Virtual sunshine of course, in all its animated glory. Enter the Weather Channel’s app, which grabs the crown for the most overboard meteorological coverage we have ever seen.

This is something you could evade hurricanes with, or charter a flight to Timbuktu. You get a world map full to the brim with data, animated vistas for every type of weather and even hourly lists of every minute change.

AP News

Reading through Associated Press’s normal news feed, no matter how current, is not a particularly enjoyable experience online. The new wire’s website lacks a decent user interface, partly because those using it need only the info in the stories.

The AP News app on the iPad changes this, creating a rich experience that allows you to interact with all of the wire service’s global coverage. Video plays smoothly and the location based news is a nice twist. The sticky note style front page is also a good effort from AP and makes it easier to navigate the heaps of stories posted every minute.

Flipboard

Flipboard is your personal magazine. Even the front cover is unique for you. Because, as well as gathering news from a number of prominent sources, it also scours your Facebook and Twitter data and presents that info as well.

And we're not talking about pages and pages of your friend's monotonous updates, we're talking about a personalised magazine where the pages are made up of articles, videos and pictures already fetched from you from any links that appear in your social media streams. Read more

Reuters News Pro

Like Associated Press, Reuters suffers from a fairly boring website but all is cured with its iPad app. Nothing is lost in terms of content quality when transferred from online to tablet, it is just a much nicer thing to browse. The app is also very responsive and speedy, which is what you want when looking through the kind of content Reuters sends out.

If you're a banker that likes to bank all day, then the Reuters app also has all sorts of stocks and markets tickers sitting on the home page. Photo fans also get a nicely updated stream of shots which come in from Reuter’s top snappers.

The baby of the Lint team, Hunter has been a tech fan since he bought his first MiniDisc..and what a waste of money that was. He began writing about electronics at the age of 16 and hasn't stopped since. Nowadays he fulfils his mobile phone and gaming obsession whilst attempting to distract people from his bizarre name. Regular meetings with the Gladiators crew see Hunter often returning to work battered and bruised. Considers himself a music obsessive, was once the most highly decorated scout in the country. Fan of trousers.